TORONTO, ON (June 1, 2015) – Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) today announced OICR is investing $4.6 million over two years in PanCuRx, an initiative that seeks solutions to the high fatality rate of pancreatic cancer. The multidisciplinary program brings together researchers from the fields of genomics, pathology, cancer biology and informatics, as well as clinician scientists, who will collaboratively work to better understand pancreatic cancer on a molecular level and use this understanding to develop better, more personalized diagnostics and therapies for patients. The research will focus on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common type of pancreatic cancer.

“There have been huge scientific advances over the past few decades on many types of cancer, but statistics on pancreatic cancer have remained largely unchanged,” said Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of OICR. “OICR is proud today to announce support for PanCuRx and help to improve these statistics and bring new solutions to patients.”

Initial funding for the initiative was provided last spring by Sylvia M. G. Soyka, director, and the Board of Trustees of the SMGS Family Foundation to the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University (CFHU). The focus of this funding is to find and identify the molecular drivers behind metastatic pancreatic cancer. Researchers at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada (IMRIC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Sheba Medical Center in Israel and at OICR in Toronto are currently working collaboratively to achieve this goal.

“This new funding will help tackle one of the least understood types of cancer. Ontario’s innovative and collaborative research community, together with our partners in Israel, are well suited for this challenge to discover new solutions and treatments that will benefit patients worldwide,” said Reza Moridi, Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation.

PanCuRx’s unique, collaborative design will allow teams of researchers to pursue research and clinical questions in parallel, with a tight link between clinical practice and lab research. The research will also be highly integrated with the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre’s translational PDAC program, ensuring that in addition to increasing understanding of the disease more generally, the research will directly inform the treatment strategy of patients who participate.

“The focus of PanCuRx is to ensure we bring the patients closer to the research and the research closer to the patients,” said Dr. Steven Gallinger, Surgical Oncologist and Head, Hepatobiliary/Pancreatic Surgical Oncology Program at University Health Network, Senior Investigator, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital and leader of the PanCuRx initiative. “By working together among disciplines and between the research and clinical components we feel much more can be accomplished and we have a real chance of making an impact on improving outcomes for PDAC patients.”

“I am alive today because of the groundbreaking treatment I received from Dr. Gallinger, Dr. Malcolm Moore and their team,” said Libby Znaimer, a prominent Canadian journalist and pancreatic cancer survivor. Znaimer received therapy targeted at the molecular level to the specific subtype of pancreatic cancer she was diagnosed with, an avenue of diagnosis and treatment that this new funding will further explore. “This summer I will celebrate seven years since diagnosis. We need more research to ensure that outcomes like mine become the norm, rather than a rare exception.”

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) makes up approximately 85 per cent of pancreatic cancer cases. In 2014, an estimated 4,700 Canadians were diagnosed with PDAC and 4,400 died from the disease. It is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in Canada and the current five-year survival rate of 7.7 per cent is the lowest of all cancers. While the number of people dying from common cancers such as breast and colon cancer has dropped dramatically over the past 30 years, there have been only slight improvements for PDAC. It is estimated that PDAC will be the second leading cause of cancer death in North America within 10 years.

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